Must it hurt?

Pain as a tool to access depth

“Must you take a sledgehammer to your balls, Harriet, every time you want to feel?”.

My therapist has always had a way with words. In the seven years we’ve worked together, he’s seen me through just as many men, each one instilling varying degrees of torture, that annoyingly end up being: quite good work.

I know hurting myself makes me feel deeper than any pleasant experience ever could. When I protest that he’s trying to ‘dampen my creative libido’ with ‘good decisions’, he suggests that I’ve made enough pain-filled choices for a a lifetime. “Could you not just remember what it’s like, rather than having to relive it time and time again?” he asks.

“Hey guys, do you wanna go to the cinema on Friday and sit in the lobby and remember Lynch’s Blue Velvet? No, no, it’ll be good. We can just visualise the heart-wrenching, illegally erotic scenes? Go on, I’ll even splash out on some invisible popcorn we can pretend to get stuck in our teeth. It’ll be a laugh!”

Well, fuck you. Yes, I did do the stupid thing. And if nothing else, here’s your consequential, inimitable output: